A collection information on blogging in schools with links to useful resources in the form of a blog. Tags are used to categorise the information for ease of use. This blog is independent and doesn't endorse any particular services mentioned.

Creative Commons

All posts tagged Creative Commons

Flickr is a free, online picture and video sharing website that is used by both professional and amateur photographers.

There are millions of pictures available to view but not all of them are available to use.

When people upload their files to Flickr they can decide which licence to share them under. This is set to All rights Reserved as default but many users choose a Creative Commons licence to share with and these are the pictures you may be able to use.

This is a joint venture between Flickr and the US Library of Congress. It aims to provide public access to thousands of archived photographs and allow for people to comment and add information to them.

By participating in the project, institutions have to declare that there are ‘no known copyright restrictions’ on the photographs and as such you will be able to use them in your blog. Many of the pictures are of a historical nature and are from institutions around the globe.

I can’t see clearly whether a specific attribution needs to be made with pictures holding a ‘no known copyright restrictions’ licence so make sure you at least link to the picture on Flickr if you use one.

You can search for images with a Creative Commons licence on Flickr relatively easily. The most recent 100 pictures for each CC licence are displayed and you can enter search terms to find something specific.

To use a picture, click on in and then the ‘share’ button on the bottom right of the screen. There you will be able to copy the HTML for your blog post. The picture will link back to Flickr. For the correct attribution you will need to include the name of the creator and a link to the details of the licence they are using. This link can be found by clicking ‘some rights reserved’ under the flickr member’s details.

This is undeniably a more difficult way of doing it than using a service like Photopin, but sometimes if you find a picture that’s not quite right and look at what else the Flickr member has in their photostream you may be find more options.

Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository containing pictures, sounds and videos that you can use on your website. Wikipedia and its sister projects, including Wikimedia Commons, operate under a Creative Commons licence. The rules for using and distributing their works are available on their websites.

It is not as simple to use as something like Photopin, with its ability to select your size and have the attribution information to hand, but there is an increasingly vast selection of media for you to use. A benefit of using Wikimedia Commons is that there are more than photographs available. Aside from the audio-visual content there are a variety of diagrams and illustrations.

There are a number of options for using a picture/ file including ‘download’ and ‘use on the web’. By clicking on these options you will see how you can select the size you want and the attribution information you need. The ‘use on the web’ option contains the HTML code for you to paste into the ‘text’ element of your post. This will automatically link back to Wikimedia Commons.

It really is worth having a look at the images and files that are available here as you may find things to use across the curriculum, not just within blogging.

A great tool for finding Creative Commons images for your blog is Flickr – a free picture and video hosting website. Their search facility can be confusing to navigate if you’re only looking for CC images and on top of that you have to work out how to attribute the picture you’ve selected.

You enter your search term and a page full of images will appear. The images at the top are sponsored images. Unless you want to pay – don’t use these. They’re separated from the CC images with a grey dotted line. An easy way to tell if you’ve clicked on a free image is whether you’ve stayed on photopin’s website – if clicking on an image takes you to a different site, it’s a paid one.

Once you’ve found your desired image and clicked on ‘preview’ to see the whole thing, click ‘download’. This will bring up a pop-up containing the image (which contains a link to the original image on Flickr). To the right of the image are a number of options for download size. You can save the picture via these links and upload them to your blog. Beneath the size options is a box with a small amount of code in. Copy and paste this into your blog post to ensure you have correctly attributed the picture.

Creative commons licences stipulate how a creator is willing to share their products and what you are able to do with them. You can find more information on their website and there is a short video explaining their uses here.